HoweEnterprise.com
December 30, 2019
What debt do I pay off first? of them have higher interest rates, you might start there and then move on to credit cards or car payments.
Hey Taylor I’ve finally saved up enough to have a healthy emergency fund and am ready to Taylor start tackling Kovar my debt. Between credit cards, car payments, and student loans, which do you think I should go after first? - Melissa
Car payment. Should your car payment have you paying more than the credit cards each month, get the car paid off. Hopefully, you got a vehicle within your price range and didn’t take on too much debt for this. While it’s nice to keep the monthly payments below $200, it’s even nicer to own the car outright, so speed up the payment process as much as you can. If you’re having trouble managing car payments and your other debts, it might be worth heading back to the dealership to see about exchanging for a cheaper model.
Hey Melissa - As long as you make a consistent effort to pay down debt without overspending, you can’t really go wrong. When it comes to which type of debt you should target first, there are a few things to consider. Credit cards. While everyone has a different situation, this is usually the place to start. Credit card debt will keep on growing if it goes unaddressed, with ridiculous interest rates and obscene penalties for late payments. I don’t know about your other debts, but I’m assuming your cards have the heftiest interest rates. I’m also hoping that this debt is smaller than whatever you owe on your student loans and car, which should make it easier to pay off. Once you have your credit cards eliminated from the balance sheet, you can take these monthly payments and add that amount to your other loans, speeding up the repayment process.
Making a very general assumption about your debt, I’d say you should pay off your credit cards, then your car, then the student loans. This order could change depending on the amounts you owe but targeting the highest interest rates and consolidating student debt usually provides the quickest path to becoming debt-free. Wishing you a very Happy New Year! Taylor Kovar, CEO of Kovar Capital. Read more about Taylor at GoFarWithKovar.com Disclaimer: Information presented is for educational purposes only and is not an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. To submit a question to be answered in this column, please send it via email to Question@GoFarWithKovar.co m, or via USPS to Taylor Kovar, 415 S 1st St, Suite 300, Lufkin, TX 75901.
Student loan debt. Barring any defaults, you should have a respectable APR on this debt. If not, I highly recommend consolidating the loans to see if you can get a better rate. You can check out my review of Splash Financial at GoFarWithKovar.com to learn more about the process of consolidation and see if Splash might help you reduce your interest payments. As long as your rates are manageable, I’d tackle all of your other debts before going after the student loans. However, if you have multiple loans through federal and private sources and some a
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Living with children This is the second in a series on “parentbabble,” as in the same-old, same-old nonsense the mental health industry John has been passing Rosemond off as sound parenting advice since the late 1960s. Last week, I skewered an online article by mindfulness parenting coach Hunter Clarke-Fields in which she references psychologist Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center, to support her claim – which she further claims is shared by “many researchers” – that punishment causes all manner of mental, emotional, and behavioral harm to children. In the late 1960s, psychologists began beating the “punishment is bad” drum and they’ve been beating it since. To conceal their complicity in the post-1960s decline in child mental health and concurrent rise of behavior problems that were rare exceptions when I was a kid (e.g. belligerent defiance and tantrums in children older than three), they alter their terminology every few years. So, for example, what is now “mindfulness” parenting was called “democratic” parenting in 1970, and what defined a brat in 1970 now defines a disorder that calls for brain-altering medication. Clarke-Fields claims that “many researchers” (meaning any number greater than three) have discovered that punishment for misbehavior causes children to (a) harbor long-term resentment toward their parents, thus damaging the parent-child relationship, (b) develop all sorts of psychological problems (this is especially true, according to the “experts” HCF consulted, concerning spanking and being yelled at), (c) become self-centered and lack empathy for others, and (d) lack an “inner moral compass.” YIKES! I ask the reader: Can it get any worse? Clarke-Fields does what psychologists and other mental health professionals have been doing for fifty-plus years: She invents psychological boogeymen, cutting them from whole cloth, which she then inflicts upon the unfortunate parents who read her mindful babble. Are there people with doctorates in psychology who teach at prestigious universities like Yale who actually believe that punishment
for misbehavior will wreak unholy havoc on a child’s mental health, dooming him to life in a refrigerator box under an overpass or in solitary confinement? Yes, Virginia, there are. Do the doctors in question qualify as “researchers”? Not unless anyone with a Ph.D. and an opinion is a researcher. Let me assure the reader that the research in question is about as shoddy and nonobjective as shoddy and nonobjective gets. But lest I stand accused of simply having an opinion, over the course of the last forty-plus years as a “parenting expert,” I’ve privately asked hundreds of adults two questions: As a child, were you punished when you misbehaved? and Do you believe that as a direct consequence of said punishment you suffer some mental or emotional problem? I’ve yet to find a person who was not punished for misbehaving. Nor have I found someone who reports that being punished caused psychological harm. “I sometimes thought it was unfair” is about as bad as it gets. Mind you, I disqualify anyone who reports having been repeatedly abused as a child, but they are relatively few. Lest I be accused of hypocrisy, I freely admit that my poll does not qualify as science; nonetheless, the consistency of its results is a slamdunk to the disingenuous notion that punishing a child for misbehavior is equivalent to abusing the child. The mental health professions have embraced the postmodern notion that with enough of the right sort of social engineering, it will be possible for the engineers (themselves, mostly) to create utopia. The logical place to begin the engineering in question, should it ever come about, is with how children are raised. Expanding the definition of child abuse to include what is currently regarded as necessary to a child’s best interests would be a shrewd strategy, indeed. If you think this is just a war of opinions of whether to punish or not to punish, think again. There’s a lot at stake here. Family psychologist John Rosemond: johnrosemond.com, parent guru.com. John Rosemond has worked with families, children, and parents since 1971 in the field of family psychology. In 1971, John earned his masters in psychology from Western Illinois University and was elected to the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.
